There is peace in the future

We have the subject of abuses to talk about — the abuses against our communities, which cannot and will not go unnoticed. I invite the reader to set reservations aside, because we are bigger than the PT or the PSL. Last Sunday, President Jair Bolsonaro was democratically elected and, if we stay alert, it will always be so: a vote cast in a trustworthy ballot box grants a mandate to whomever the people choose. But I also invite the reader to look at a remark by German professor Hanna Knapp that I heard recently. I write about Germany so that we can compare ourselves with a country better than ours, not worse.

It is an overview. Germany — besides its historical importance — maintains a leading role in the European Union and is one of the largest economies in the world. That country, which from here on thickens our conversation, is attentive to policies for refugees and to violence by neo-Nazi groups. Germany’s Foreign Ministry, in the person of minister Heiko Maas, asks U.S. President Donald Trump for a cordial attitude. Such an attitude is broad and futuristic, running through economic agreements and human rights.

Judging by the remarks of professors — Brazilian historian Francielly Barbosa researches the developments of Nazism in Curitiba — and by the news content, we understand the German concern: they work to prevent the tragic events of the Second World War from being repeated. Although Germany is a democratic country with a free press, groups in favor of crimes are prevented from propagating ideas. That is where the “paradox of intolerance” comes from. A paradox is an “opinion contrary to the common.” An example helps. Hypothetically, a group that assaults and kills (or that believes assaulting and killing are paths to the world) — in this example, a neo-Nazi group — must be fought so that it does not assault and does not kill. Germany and other countries understood that intolerance must be offered to the intolerant. Hence the expression “paradox of intolerance.”

The German experience is that, step by step, one can reach the death of millions of people. For those who understand the killing of humans as irreparable atrocity, violent groups — of the right, of the left, abusers disguised as #lulalivre or #B17 (Bolsonaro’s ballot number), and a huge list — must be close targets of our police and our community leaders.

Well above the election, the removal of an anti-fascist banner from a university is an alarm — and that did happen, in Brazil. One step, then another, then another. Now, if someone is effectively a fascist, that person has problems with the police. That there is an ethical crisis in universities, no one doubts — we could mention the installation of electoral committees inside them, for example. University students often reach the world of work lost. But if university students cannot be anti-fascist, the ethical crisis is also in families, governments and police. Last year, I conducted interviews with professors, historians, police chiefs and psychologists to talk, journalistically, about violent groups — but the editors to whom I offered the material did not consider the subject sufficiently relevant.